Heartbeat: Opportunity knocks at Midland Met

February 22, 2022

The opening of Midland Met is highly anticipated, and rightly so.

It’s fair to say our move to Midland Met is a journey and one we’re all on together. Over the past year, we have planned, prepped, and worked tirelessly to ensure that we provide safe and high-quality services when we open.

Midland Met brings a once in a lifetime opportunity to create a healthcare facility that will significantly enhance the care we provide. It means we can transform services across our estate at SWB and in our communities. We will have dedicated consultant-led acute care teams seven days a week, a clinical model focused on keeping patients mobile, and a children’s emergency department and assessment unit, to name but a few things we will benefit from when Midland Met opens. Plus, we have secured funding to develop with partners a learning campus that will train our future workforce.

But in reality, it is so much more than that. For colleagues who’ll be working onsite, it means the opportunity to work on a brand-new campus with a much-improved working environment. And our other sites will be reconfigured to make the most of our estate. For example, we will create additional meeting rooms at Sandwell and City Hospitals.

To ensure that we stay united on our journey to Midland Met, we’re introducing a new way of tracking our progress as an organisation. The six-step change programme will be adapted across all services to ensure consistency. It will mean that we are checking off certain critical activities and tasks as we take steady steps towards opening our new hospital.

Our new six-step programme consists of:

1. Transformation planning – A period of controlled change and planning
2. Testing and getting ready – Putting our plans into action
3. All aboard – colleague orientation and induction
4. Ready to move checkpoint
5. Our first 100 days
6. Optimising for continued success.

Ruth Wilkin, Director of Communications, remarked: “We are adopting this new approach as we have reached a point in our programme where we must all be joined up. Everyone needs to be aware of what is happening as we implement our plans to open Midland Met.

“2021 saw a lot of change and progress, and now we’re building on that with a consistent communications approach. It means that everyone will recognise where we are on our journey and, importantly, what we need to do in each phase before we move on to the next.

“Currently, we are in the transformation planning phase. As you’d expect, we have ongoing building work with lots of work going into our clinical pathways. We cannot move forward until we have checked off all these points. Next, we will move onto the testing and getting ready phase, a period of readiness and testing. There is so much to test, and we’ll continue to do this across all areas, refining processes as we go until we’re ready to open our doors.”

Ruth added: “We hope that this will help colleagues recognise and respond to the upcoming content over the coming months. In 2022 we’ll share news of our staff induction process, community engagement, and technical commissioning will begin.

“A lot of hard work has got us to this point, and I thank everyone for their professionalism and continued support.”